We Have a Pope – review

Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope: 'deeply disappointing'. Photograph: Cannes Film Festival/HO/EPA

Nanni Moretti's deeply disappointing comedy manages to do little with the problems caused by an outsider (Michel Piccoli) elected pope, then refusing to take office. Moretti himself plays Italy's greatest psychoanalyst, a non-believer brought in to help out (shades of the 1967 Hollywood satire The President's Analyst), but nothing much comes of this. Nor of the new pope slipping out of the Vatican to take up with a theatrical company producing The Seagull. The film flails as it fails, refusing even to mention any of the current serious isssues confronting the church or the nation.